Changing Perspectives
by GunBunnyCentral
Summary: She changes, and his perception changes with her...


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Title: Changing Perspectives  
**Author:** Margaret Brown, aka Andromeda Valentine  
**Fandom:** Mutant X  
**Pairing:** Adam/Shalimar  
**Rating:** PG  
**Status:** New (07/05/03); Complete  
**Archive:** Yes to list archives, anyone else please ask first.  
**Feedback:** Yes, please!!  
**E-mail address for feedback:** andromeda_valentine@hotmail.com  
**Series/Sequel:** None  
**Other Websites:** Crimson Redd -   
**Disclaimers:** Not mine

Summary: She changes, and his perception changes with her...

Notes: Written for the MXFiclets weekly challenge: Impressions - of others, a particular other, or of one's self... 

Warnings: Slight spoilers for Ep. 222, 'Lest He Become'...

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"Let me not to the marriage of true minds  
Admit impediments. Love is not love  
That alters when it alteration finds,  
Nor bends with the remover to remove.  
Oh, no, it is an ever fixed mark  
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.  
It is the star to every wandering bark  
Whose worth's unknown although its height be taken."

-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

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When he thinks about her, it isn't the little girl he first met that he remembers.

He remembers finally finding her again after learning of her flight from the asylum, hoping against hope that the streets had been kinder to a scared, lost little girl than he expected them to be. She'd been fourteen then, still more girl than woman, and strangely removed from the carefree child he'd treated all those years ago.

She'd seemed like a frail, wounded dove that night - so very desperately ill from her mutation growing unchecked, but still full of defiance. For all her illness, and despite the squalor of the 'hotel' she lived in, both she and her room were painfully neat and clean - almost as if in defiance of the wretchedness surrounding her. 

He'd wondered how he would talk her into leaving with him, spent hours trying to form just the right chain of words to make her listen without misreading his intentions. None of it had been necessary - recognition, and hope, had flared in those brown eyes of hers the moment she saw him. She'd whispered his name, almost like a prayer, and lain her head against his shoulder as he carried her out of there, too weak to make even the short trip to his car on her own feet.

In that moment - with that simple gesture - she claimed his heart as hers. He found the daughter he'd never had, and she found the father figure she didn't even know she needed.

He also remembers a hot August night some two years later, when his view of her changed yet again. Her Sweet Sixteen party - the half-wild girl he'd taken in now grown into a happy young woman. He'd watched her dance with her friends and flirt with boys from school, and seen, with a jolt of surprise, the woman she would become.

And if he found that woman mesmerizing, he kept it to himself - even after she impulsively kissed him full on the mouth that night for the first time ever. Just a quick peck, almost fleeting, but unusual for her, and he'd smiled at her and taken it as the display of familial affection he assumed it was.

As a scientist, and a doctor, he should have known not to assume anything - for, more years later, on yet another hot August night, things changed once more. Her birthday again, a grown woman now and his equal in wit and willpower. And more beautiful than ever...

They'd kissed for real that night - something about the moment finally breaking down the carefully preserved walls between them - and found something neither of them had quite expected. They'd woken in each other's arms the next morning, and every morning thereafter.

Their wedding day brought yet another shift in perspective, sparking emotions in him that his scientific mind had long ago ceased to even remember. He didn't have words for any of it - all he knew was that she was now bound to him forever, by choice, by words and a ring, and it felt *right* to think of her as his wife.

To the amusement of his 'family,' however, it was the last and final shift in perspective that moved him most - the announcement that she was carrying his child. Maybe it was the awesome responsibility of parenthood - the pure strangeness of thinking of himself as a father - that made the transition from 'lover and wife' to 'mother' so mind-boggling.

But he makes it, with joy and no hesitation, and when he sees her hold their son for the first time, face aglow through her fatigue, he realizes that *that* is how he will always remember her - with the shared perspectives of surrogate daughter, lover, wife, and mother all rolled into one and offered up in her eyes and her smile...


End file.
